A leading university has announced plans for a new campus in central London by taking over one of the capital’s most iconic buildings.
King’s College London has acquired Bush House, fronted by giant neo-classical columns and formerly the headquarters of the BBC World Service, plus three associated buildings in the Strand on a 50-year lease.
Its principal described the move to the new Aldwych campus, which will begin next year, as a defining moment in the history of King’s as it prepares to expand.
Other London universities are already forging ahead with plans for new campuses as the capital consolidates its position as one of the world’s foremost destinations for undergraduate and postgraduate study.
University College London will open an east campus on an 11-acre site in the Olympic Park in 2018 and Imperial College London is opening a 25-acre site in White City, west London this year. The London School of Economics is also expanding its footprint by buying a neo-Jacobean building in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
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King’s will begin moving in to Bush House and a second building, Strand House, next year and take possession of the adjacent buildings, King House and Melbourne House, from 2025.
When the BBC World Service left Bush House in 2012 it was bought by a Japanese manufacturing company, Kato Kagaku, which engaged the architect John Robinson and spent £60 million restoring it in keeping with the vision of Irving T Bush, the New York businessman who commissioned it in the 1920s, when it was the world’s most expensive building.
Ed Byrne, the Australian academic appointed last year as principal of King’s, would not reveal the cost of leasing the Aldwych buildings, but said they had achieved a “fair deal”. “This is one of the most exciting things to have happened in King’s for quite some years,” Professor Byrne said.
CORRECTION: We incorrectly credited the architects engaged in the restorations at Bush House as “John Robinson” (News, Mar 11). The name of the practice is John Robertson Architects.